Creeper World 3: Arc Eternal

I’m only a few missions in, which isn’t very far at all, but as near as I can tell, this is just the same old Creeper World with a new 3D engine. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. But am I missing anything? Does anything new and cool get added at some point?

-Tom

My question is: Is there any reason I should want Creeper World in 3D?

From the demo, the fluid waves require more attention than just controlling the much more predictable sequential level rises, with some enemies and ground features adding creeper spikes that are a bit hairier than emitters. And nullifiers don’t explode, they must keep being protected, so you can get “fun” failure cascades.
From the alpha videos, managing the non-energy resources to use different weapons and upgrades seems fairly different, but they weren’t really in the beta.

I feel like the fluid dynamics “read” better in 3D, if that makes any sense. And it is pretty cool to see your logistics network modeled in 3D. So I would say, yeah, Creeper World in 3D is a thing worth having.

-Tom

Creeper seems gloopier, so it’s less frenetic.

It’s still an easy game where victory feels inevitable right off the bat and consequently I feel like I’m mostly just grinding my way through it. There’s just no real counterplay available to the creeper. Sure, you can be lazy and not plug all the holes but the worst you’ll suffer is maybe losing a couple of towers. Everything is just too easily mitigated. Like the air strikes - they could’ve been a potential back door into your base but your missile towers have no effective limits and make quick work of them. Other things get added to the mix but everything just boils down to remembering to spam out enough counter turrets.

Infested planet did some interesting things with mutations that would make certain strategies unviable as levels went on and you’d have to adapt accordingly especially as your resources were limited. You were constantly on your toes as the combinations were random. They Are Billions opted for survival waves that got increasingly (and severely) harder so you could not ignore expansion whilst forcing to build a house of cards at the heart of your defences that could come crashing down very quickly indeed if you were not vigilant enough. There’s just nothing like that here, so far (I think I’m about halfway through).

That said, the transition to 3D works well and creeper depth is definitely easier to read. Almost as if to make up for that, however, you are presented with an awful UI that is completely stuffed to the gills with fluff you’ll never need.

Still, given some of the other games I’ve been playing lately, it’s a welcome change of pace. I just don’t see enough in terms of new gameplay mechanics to recommend it over CW3.

Good observations all around, Mr. Ferro. But the Creeper World games are more about optimization than the uncertainty of victory. It’s worth noting that leaderboards record the amount of time it takes you to solve a map. I think the idea is that you’re suppose to approach this as a score chase, which comes down to optimizing your approach. If that doesn’t appeal to you, then you might not be Creeper World’s target audience.

Infested Planet is still so good.

-Tom

Everytime I see the game mentioned it reminds me when I had the honor of talking to you on your podcast. You were such a great host and easy to talk to - I was pretty nervous. I need to play some more Infested Planet, it’s been a while. Could you ask people to stop coming out with new games please?

I wrapped up the CW4 campaign today. The last mission was, of course, the hardest (I actually had to restart a couple of times) but it kinda highlights my issues with this formula really. The hardest any level will ever be is in the opening minutes which is exactly what happens here; a new enemy and a new creeper mechanic that get thrown at you a couple of minutes in. Survive that and it’s back to the usual attrition and inevitable win.

Enjoyable, but with the new doodads being somewhat scant I don’t think there’s really anything compellingly fresh on offer over CW3. Other than maybe the 3D, which I have to say became more of a double edged sword as the game went on. The towering near-opaque mountains of creeper and anticreeper in the later levels become anything but readable. Fortunately they can be mitigated in the visibility options menu but by the point you’ve made everything as flat as possible and find yourself switching regularly to the top-down view every time you place a tower you begin to wonder if the switch to 3D really was such a great idea after all…


@tomchick

I’m wary of leaderboards because they’re extremely difficult to prevent even trivial abuse of unless you’re going full GaaS with as much of the game logic running on the server as possible. Even with that in place, they’re still open to plenty of malfeasance depending on what you’re measuring (see: Diablo 3). For this reason alone they’ll never offer me any real motivation as a gamer.

Anyway, all we’re really talking about here is par times. Which I’d be up for, maybe, if the game included some of its own here but I don’t think the developer really included any; there are certainly no achievements to that effect, nor creeperbucks and unlockables to be earned for chasing them down.

Plus I kinda feel this sort of game, where speedy completion is still likely to be around 30mins for most of the levels (I seemed to average maybe 50mins for a first run through snagging all the objectives), is a somewhat bad fit for score chasing. I’d much rather see if I can break the 3 minute mark in Tormenter X Punisher, for example.

I also finished the main campaign. Overall, I think this was a bit easier than CW3, or maybe I’ve gotten good enough at the game that I don’t struggle as much with the challenge. That said, I enjoyed my time with it and will be messing around with the rest of the content. For me, these games really scratch a particular itch. Something about slowly beating back an overwhelming force is extremely satisfying.

I was able to complete most maps in around 40-50 minutes. The second to last map gave me the most trouble, with lots of restarts. The final map, while not as difficult for me, still took over 2 hours to complete.

Good fun!

This is my recollection of CW3, which I never finished but spent some hours on. Fun, but yeah after the opening moments it seemed kind of impossible to lose. I should reinstall it. I seem to recall the campaign being quite long.

Playing the Creeper World 4 demo encouraged me to dive properly in to CW3, which has been sitting barely played in my Steam library for a while. I’ve basically finished the starter campaign thing, save for the timed mission because I hate timed missions. I’ve dabbled a bit in the Tormented Space and Prospector Zone areas, but am finding the levels (randomly generated, at least in the latter?) a bit uninspiring, so wanted to dive into the community maps, but hoo boy just looking at the highly rated ones in the browser those seem crazy. Where’s a good place to start with that stuff?

Edit: finished the campaign properly now, thanks to some help from the internet and a lot of retries. Didn’t help that I didn’t know/had forgotten about the boost you get from annihilated enemies. Anyway, I’m still curious to know about the community maps, but also if there’s anything else in the game pitched around the level of the end of the campaign. The prospector worlds seem too easy and the Torment Space worlds too hard (for now).

Did anyone really play CW4? I’m a massive fan of CW3, and have only just gotten around to playing through CW4 now. I’ve been posting my times to the QT3 tag, as I did CW3, but I haven’t noticed a single other time in there :( Only @BrianRubin on my friend’s list owns it, though 10 people have it on their wishlist :P

It’s literally just CW3 in 3D, with no real practical differences. In some senses I prefer CW3, as the map is easier to read in 2d (Even the top-down view in CW4 is harder to read than CW3) I think and I felt that the horrendously bad story that seems to exist in these games was better in CW3. Not that I read any of it, as I skip it all. I’ve barely read one line of the CW4 one past the missions in the demo.

However, the developer added co-op multiplayer a few months back, so that’s a massive, major difference that definitely gives CW4 the edge!

I played CW4, it has a whole new dimension, but I’m not sure that’s enough to make it a better game.
And the last time I checked, it didn’t have much in the way of great custom made maps, the way CW3 apparently had.

I grabbed it when it first came out. I remember playing some earlier version on Kongregate while at work late on the weekends and figured 3D must make it awesome! I liked it until I hit a wall at some early level where there seemed to be only one way to beat it and even after figuring that part out I still couldn’t build my doohickies fast enough to ever get past a certain pinch-point and would eventually just get overwhelmed. I should probably go back and try again or read a solution to that one level. But if later levels are all just totally puzzle with one solution it doesn’t really grab me.

I’ve played a crap ton of CW4. It’s not measurably different from CW3, although if I remember correctly, in CW3, once you neutralize an emitter, it’s destroyed. In CW4 you need to take an extra step and overload your neutralizer to remove an emitter from the map. This takes quite a bit of energy.

I got a lot of mileage out of the daily challenges. It’s fun to see how fast you can clear a map. However, server cheating led to some impossible scores on the leaderboard.

User maps are hit or miss as usually. There’s some really creative stuff, but most of it ended up being heavily modded maps with strange rules. I’m more a purest with this game and don’t find it all that interesting to engage with the mods.

I got a lot of hours out of it before finally putting it down.

Barely touched CW4 yet, and I’ve already got something to look forward too.

This guy is going to keep making creeper games until he dies.

As long as he keeps finding new and interesting directions to take that same basic idea.

Creeper World 2 and Particle Fleet were some of the weaker entries in the series, so why not combine them both for the next one!?

Here’s the latest video which is a quasi interview about the next Creepr World game:

Mr KnucklerCracker desparately needs to hire a writer. Everything written in all of the Creeper World games, including the unit names, is beyond terrible and utterly cringe worthy. It’s also unskippable in a lot of the games. Which is a shame as the Creeper World series of games are some of the most enjoyable things you can play on a computer. Perhaps the hamfisted lore dumps are a way of karmatically balancing out all of that greatness? Maybe that’s why he’s able to keep churning out the hits? Most game developers hit a wall and release a stinker of a game, but this guy has it all figured out and so sabotages each game to mean that, in the long run, he’s able to keep going? Smart!